Joseph
Martin Kraus was almost an exact contemporary of Mozart
and has been dubbed ‘the Swedish Mozart’. He was born five
months after Mozart on 20 June 1756 and died a year and
ten days after the great composer on 15 December 1792.
He was actually born in Miltenberg in Germany but moved
to Stockholm in 1778 to work in the court of King Gustav
III. I first came across Kraus thanks to the initial CD
in the Naxos series dedicated to him. It contained the
overture to Olympie and three rather remarkable
symphonies which I came to love. Volumes 2, 3 and 4 of
the series followed without too protracted a delay and
I was hooked. Why hadn’t I heard of Kraus before? Geography
can sometimes act against such recognition and it didn’t
help that several of Kraus’s symphonies had been misattributed
to other composers for many years.

Like
Haydn in Eszterháza, Kraus’s isolation from mainstream
Europe caused him to develop along an original musical
path. Some of his earlier music sounds a little like Stürm
und Drang Haydn, while some of the last music has a
Romantic style that makes one wish he had lived into the
nineteenth century. Then we might have seen some fireworks!
Kraus had a wonderful lyrical gift. Some of his melodies
rival Mozart’s in their seeming endlessness – something
one hears several times in the aforementioned symphonies.

So
what of this issue? I was keen to hear it and discover
some more of this remarkable composer’s work. The first
thing to say is that this music is far lighter than many
of the symphonies. This was written for the theatre, not
for solemn occasions. The two Pantomimes which sandwich
the main item on this disc, the ballet Fiskarena,
were written while Kraus was still a young student in Mannheim
and the circumstances surrounding their composition remain
a mystery. Were one not to know the title, the first Pantomine in
D might pass off quite comfortably as a three-movement sinfonia.
It is attractive music but gives little away of what was
to come, although the beautiful solo oboe writing in the Adagio already
displays Kraus’s melodic talents. Bertil van Boer, editor
of Kraus’s music (hence the ‘VB’ numbers) and writer of
the excellent booklet notes, suggests that the Pantomine in
G is an even earlier work than its D major counterpart.
Its music is more four-square and the insertion of a short March between
the first and slow movements gives this Pantomime more
the character of a divertimento. The two movements
Kraus composed for insertion into a 1787 Royal Stockholm
Opera production of Gluck’s Armide are attractive
trifles – pure ballet music.

The
main fare on this CD is the dramatic ballet Fiskarena (The
Fishermen). It was first staged on 9 March 1789 by the
Royal Opera and won immediate popularity. The plot and
choreography have long been lost and so any suggestions
as to the goings-on in the Overture and twenty brief numbers
that follow can only be educated guesses. This matters
not a jot, however as the music is attractive enough to
stand on its own, including two nautical hornpipe-like Angloises
and a gipsy Ungherese just before the rousing Contradanza
Finale.

This
CD, then, reveals a lighter side to Kraus’s art than that
in earlier instalments in this series. It is a side to
which the composer was firmly committed in Stockholm and
so it is important in the appreciation of Kraus’s work
to have this illuminating disc.

As
in earlier volumes of this Kraus series, the Swedish Chamber
Orchestra under Petter Sundkvist play these works as if
by second nature, revealing their delightful colours and
intricacies. The recording matches the performances perfectly,
with a natural and well-balanced acoustic that allows the
music to speak entirely for itself.

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